quote:

---

Critics of the Christian bible occasionally can score a point or two in discussion with the religious community by noting the many teachings in both the old and new testaments that encourage the bible believer to hate and to kill, biblical lessons that history proves Christians have taken most seriously. Nonetheless the bible defendant is apt to offer as an indisputable parting shot, "But don't forget the Ten Commandments. They are the basic bible teaching. Study the Ten Commandments."

Do study the Ten Commandments! They epitomize the childishness, the vindictiveness, the sexism, the inflexibility and the inadequacies of the bible as a book of morals.

---

Doesn't say that those who beleive in different/more gods are evil, simply a statement of monotheist beliefs. Nothing harmful here, next.

"You shall not make for yourself an idol.."

A regulation for religous worship. Who can this possibly harm? Besides, isn't it good not to worhsip material things?

"You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain"

Not a bad thing, although everyone does it a bit. But cursing the heathens for not beleiving in your god would be a vain use... I don't see how this commandment is bad.

"Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy."

A day of rest to spend time with your family and friends? Doesn't sound bad.

"Honor your father and your mother"

No parents are perfect, but considering how much parents give and do for their children, a little respect is not too much to ask.

"You shall not murder"

This one goes without saying...

"You shall not commit adultery"

It's wrong and hurtful. Can't stand your spouse? We have these things called divorces...

"You shall not steal"

Another one that can't really be argued against.

"You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

This, like the rest of the last 6 commandments are not exclusive to religous people- its part of common decent morality. Some people don't beleive in right and wrong, but I beleive in it in certain cases like this- lying to the police about your neighbor bacuse you don't like him/her is WRONG.

"You shall not covet thy neighbor's property"

Jealousy leads to hate. Just because wives were once considered property does not diminish from the fact that even today material posessions are not the source of true happiness.

I fail to see the problem wiht the ten commandments. Are there questionable scriptures? duhh, Leviticus. But those are a different discussion. 6 out of the 10 commandments should be practiced by everyone of all religeons or lack therof. The other 4 relate only to people who choose to follow Christianity, Judaism, and I think Islam too (although I am not that knowledgable about the Koran to say for sure. But I do know that most of the OT books appear in the Torah).

Anyways, unless taken in an archaic and literal sense, the ten commandments are at worst irrelevant and at best they are a great set of rules to live by.

quote:

---

In essence, the first four commandments all scream that "the lord thy god" has an uneasy vanity, and like most dictators, must resort to threats, rather than intellectual persuasion, to promote a point of view. If there were an omnipotent god, can you imagine him or her being concerned if some poor little insignificant creature puttered around and made a graven image?

---

But the notion that God is the only god in existence was not current when the Ten Commandments were written down. It is a later development.

The commentary in this article is from a twentieth/twenty-first-century humanist perspective. It's decontextualized. For a newly monotheistic tribe trying to preserve its integrity in a polytheistic world, these laws make a lot of sense. But the notion of universal morality that emerges in later Judaism and in Christianity and Islam is not present yet in the ten commandments. YHWH at this point is a tribal war god.

quote:

---

Commandments six through nine - thou shalt not kill, commit adultery, steal or bear false witness - obviously have merit, but even they need extensive revision. To kill in self-defense is regrettable, but it is certainly morally defensible, eminently sensible conduct. So is the administration of a shot or medication that will end life for the terminally ill patient who wishes to die.

---

Not likely a huge concern in a primitive tribal society. Anyway, I've read that the commandment in the original Hebrew is not "thou shalt not kill" but "thou shalt do no murder" - not the same thing. If it were literally "thou shalt not kill," the ancient Israelites would have been vegetarians walking around on those stilt-like shoes so as not to crush too many bugs.

[ 12 July 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]

As a reader of that fine Canadian divine and teacher of poetics Northrop Frye, I'm not distressed by epic/heroic forms and diction, which is a fair way of describing the historical/rhetorical character of some books of the Christian OT, although I can see where people who insist on reading these texts literally and as instant, unmediated guides to living their own daily lives might have extreme reactions to them, positive and/or negative.

There are other books of the OT -- Ecclesiastes, for instance -- that invite an entirely different sort of reading, and would present less of an immediate challenge to the literal reader.

A question about that opening source, Michelle (or anyone): where would be the "many teachings" in the NT that "encourage the bible believer to hate and to kill"? (Ok: let's leave out the trippy St John the Divine -- who knows whether that man was encouraging anything, although that has certainly been a curious result, has it not?)

To me, both the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7 inclusive, espec the Beatitudes, Matt 5:3-12) and I Corinthians 13 (I can't believe I'm quoting St Paul) can reasonably be read as recastings of the commandments in later forms. To a student of poetics, anyway, they are both the same thing and a different thing.

That having been said I generally agree with the article itself.

Addendum to add a bit of thread drift, hopefully not severe:

Does anyone who knows Hebrew know if the earliest books of the Old Testament were written in a Hebrew form of dactylic hexameter?

[ 13 July 2003: Message edited by: DrConway ]

quote:

---

That having been said I generally agree with the article itself.

---

As do I. Its logic is off, but its conclusions make sense to me. Less than half those commandments work as actual laws in a secular modern world, which is why it was inappropriate to put a Ten Commandments tablet in the Alabama legislature. "Thou shalt not murder," "thou shalt not steal," and "thou shalt not bear false witness" (under some circumstances) are still laws today - but the rest of the commandments are issues of private morality and religious belief.

[ 13 July 2003: Message edited by: Smith ]